The number of computer applications used by large corporations has increased significantly over the past twenty years. For example, companies may employ separate applications for electronic mail, document control, financial applications, inventory management, manufacturing control and engineering functions, in addition to overall network access. Each application may, in turn, include numerous modules and screens, each with one or more functions. Due to numerous regulatory and business requirements, many applications include filtering features that block individual user access to particular data. However, each application often requires a separate administrative function to define, store, and distribute user privileges associated with the users.
From a management perspective, it is cumbersome to set filtering rules for each end user across the multiple systems and applications that the user may access, and then update these as necessary. Furthermore, the need to implement processes for each new application added by an organization is often repetitive of processes already in place for other applications. Indeed, the multitude of computer applications a user interacts with on a daily basis makes it both cumbersome and expensive to create and maintain a complete set of filtering rules for a user.